Amy Winehouse's brief, wild life

   Amy Winehouse may not have lived long enough for her considerable talent to mature. She was 27 when she died from alcohol poisoning in 2011. Her early demise makes Winehouse a problematic subject for a biographical movie. 

   Fair to say, Winehouse's life had only one act -- albeit a wild one.

   In some respects, Winehouse revivified a rock n’ roll cliche — lacing her stardom with an unholy triumvirate: sex, drugs, and alcohol. Her inspirations derived from sources as diverse as rapper Lauryn Hill and singer Sarah Vaughan. She didn’t want to be pinned to anyone's genre bulletin board.

   Defined by uncompromising independence and a powerful voice, Winehouse blazed bright; she was nominated for eight Grammys and won six of them. 

   Back to Black tells Winehouse’s story, serving it in jagged chunks that seem appropriate for a singer/songwriter whose Rehab can be read as an anthem of spirited defiance. 

   “They tried to make me go to rehab but I said, ‘No. No. No.’”

  The movie’s title — taken from Winehouse’s 2006 album of the same name — suggests dark currents. Winehouse’s journey toward oblivion centers on a startling and dynamic performance from Marisa Abela, who sings the movie’s musical numbers. No lip-synching here. 

   In this telling, Winehouse draws inspiration and affection from her grandmother, Nan Cynthia (Lesley Manville), a nightclub singer who functions as a mentor to Winehouse, a Jewish girl from North London who's often shown wearing a conspicuously displayed Star of David.

   Winehouse also receives support from her dad (Eddie Marsan), a dedicated father who tries to keep Winehouse on track, no easy job considering Winehouse went to great lengths to prove she was no Spice Girl pop star.  As is frequently the case with headstrong rebels, Winehouse clashed with those who wanted to shape her career.

  Much of the movie centers on Winehouse’s heated but disastrous relationship with Blake Fielder-Civil (Jack O’Connell). Blake charts his own course through the world of drugs.

   Credit O’Connell with generating the bad-boy charm that Winehouse found irresistible. Put it this way: Their relationship wasn’t the stuff of rom-coms.

     I can’t say “no no no” to Back to Black, probably because I’m too much of a sucker for courageously immersive performances, and Abela certainly gives one. But director Sam Taylor-Johnson, working from an episodic screenplay by Matt Greenhalgh, creates a movie that often feels so scattershot and confrontational you may want to push it away.

     By the end, that's what I found myself doing.

All's not fair in love and at the office

 Create a toxic workplace in which competitive juices aggressively flow. Add a romance between two employees who are vying for advancement and you've got the makings of a crisp movie. 

  If you didn't already think office romances were a bad idea, director Chloe Domont's Fair Play should seal the deal.

  Domont deals with an office relationship in which the male partner (Alden Ehrenreich) can't conceal his simmering resentment about a promotion awarded to his fiancee (Phoebe Dynevor), a financial whiz-kid who works at the same hedge fund. 

  By the end of the movie, Domont, who also wrote the screenplay,  can be accused of going over-the-top, but she deserves credit for not holding back. When she fires, she wants the bullet to hit.

  Defying a company policy forbidding inter-office romance, Dynevor's Emily and Ehrenreich's Luke live together with plans to marry. To avoid discovery, they arrive at the office separately and never act like anything but colleagues.

    At first, Luke insists he's proud of the advancement Emily has earned. He assures her that he fully supports her, a claim to which you may find yourself thinking, "Yeah, right." 

     The matter is further complicated because Luke, a financial analyst, will be working for Emily. She's now his fiancee and his boss, not the best arrangement for a satisfying happily-ever-after.

     Domont often treats sex between Luke and Emily as an act of aggression, perhaps because these two lovers can't hide their competitive egos under the covers. 

     In moves that may remind you of Neil LaBute's 1997 In the Company of Men, Domont shows that the atmosphere at Crest Capital reeks of faux bonhomie and real brutality. The boss (Eddie Marsan) makes no attempt to hide his fangs.  A low-key Marsan leaves no doubt that the firm's chief can go for the jugular. He's like a coiled snake.

     It would be difficult for a director to make this kind of movie without examining the heavy masculine vibe generated in the office. To show she's up to it, Emily joins her male colleagues at a bar where they watch pole dancers. She tries to prove that she can be as hard a drinker as her male companions.

     Initially, Emily tries to help Luke be promoted, presumably so that the two can be on equal footing again. When her attempts fail, Luke inadvisedly takes matters into his own hands. He embarrasses himself with a career-wrecking speech he makes to Marsan's character.

      We know that when things sour between Emily and Luke -- each well-played by Dynevor and Ehrenreich -- the resultant breakup won't be pretty. It's also not entirely believable, but Domont isn't playing around. Fair Play keeps us involved, even during the times when we wonder whether Domont might be pushing things too far.

     

All dressed up with nowhere new to go

 

   In Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre, Jason Statham joins director Guy Ritchie for a spy/caper movie that feels as if a lot of ingredients were thrown into a blender in the hope that a movie would emerge. It didn’t. Not really.

  Adopting the seriousness of a man who might have just lost his best friend, Stratham plays Orson Fortune, a mercenary who operates outside official channels. You know the drill. Orson fights the good fight but remains his own man. 

  Ritchie has been creating visual razzle-dazzle ever since his breakthrough with Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, some 24 years ago. This time, he offers a less frenzied movie. We’re talking comparatively, of course.

   The story kicks off when (Cary Elwes), as a suave fellow who recruits espionage crews, enlists Orson to locate a weapon that has found its way onto the market.

   British intelligence -- represented by a character played by Eddie Marsan -- doesn't know what the object is. That's the job: Find out what's for sale and make sure it doesn't fall into the wrong hands. 

   Joining Fortune are Aubrey Plaza (as a sexy tech whiz) and Bugzy Malone (as a sharpshooter).  Both are underutilized.

    It doesn't take long for Fortune to encounter Greg Simmonds (Hugh Grant), a sleazy arms dealer with tons of money. Sounding as if he's channeling Michael Caine's accent, Grant seems to be having more fun than anyone else in the movie. 

   Josh Hartnett joins in as Danny, a movie star who's supposed to help infiltrate the operation run by the star-struck Simmonds. That could happen, right?

    If you see Operation Fortune, it's probably best to give up on coherence and enjoy Grant's happy scenery chewing in a movie that sometimes plays like an off-the-rack helping of Bond. 

     Ritchie's too skilled totally to hit bottom, even with a movie that slides over what feels like old ground. Ritchie makes good use of luxe locations and (thank goodness) doesn't seem to be taking himself seriously.

     Most of the characters, by the way, are very well dressed.

     Don’t get me wrong.  I’m not recommending Operation Fortune; I’m talking about how to approach the movie if you happen to give it a try — now or in its non-theatrical afterlife.

A recreation of a daring Israeli raid

7 Days in Entebbe isn't a bad movie, but it doesn't dig deep enough to be memorable.

In 1976, Israel launched Operation Thunderbolt, a daring raid in which a small group of IDF soldiers rescued 102 Israelis who had been passengers on an Air France plane that was hijacked by two Germans and two Palestinians.

7 Days in Entebbe, a movie about the hijacking and subsequent Israeli action, arrives nearly 42 years after an event that riveted world attention. Daniel Bruhl and Rosamund Pike headline the cast as German radicals who initially thought they were leading the charge but who quickly were surpassed by Palestinians from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

The Palestinians took charge once the plane arrived in Uganda, after a refueling stop in Benghazi, Libya. Once in Entebbe, hostages were housed in a decaying airport terminal that was no longer in use.

Movies such as 7 Days raise an obvious but unavoidable question. Why are we being asked to look at an event that since has been eclipsed by so many other events involving terrorist actions that put innocent civilians in harm's way? In part, the question can be answered with one sentence: Such events are inherently exciting and suspenseful.

But for a movie to succeed, it must get beyond that surface and dig deeper? As directed by Jose Padilha, 7 Days fails to function as more than a cinematic outline, offering quick looks into the motivation of the story's various players.

No stranger to tough, action-oriented movies, Padilha directed the Netflix series Narcos and made Bus 174, a documentary about hostages trapped on a bus in Rio. He also directed Elite Squad, a compelling Brazilian police drama. In 2014, Padilha tried his hand at a Hollywood reboot, a much-derided version of RoboCop .

7 Days emphasizes the importance of the moment at which the hijackers separated Jews from the non-Jews, evoking memories of Holocaust selections in the minds of the Jewish passengers and among the Israeli public.

The highest levels of the Israeli government also took note of the separate treatment of Jews as issues pertaining to saving the hostages were debated. Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin (Lior Ashkenazi) and Defense Minister Shimon Peres (Eddie Marsan) took different sides.

Rabin knew he had to do something but wasn’t entirely sure that he should dismiss the possibility of negotiating with the Palestinians, something that went against Israeli policy forbidding talks with terrorists. Perez favored military action.

At one point, Uganda's Idi Amin (nicely played by Nonso Anozie) gets involved. He’s able to persuade the Palestinians to release the French hostages.

Padilha’s strangest decision involves the use of the Batsheva Dance Company which does a jarring musical version of Echad Mi Yodea (Who Knows One), a song usually sung at Passover seders. Staged by Israeli choreographer Ohad Naharin, the dance -- seen in rehearsals and eventually in a performance -- proves compelling but because it opens the movie, it tends to upstage the rest of the story and it's never entirely clear why Padihla includes it.

To justify the dance sequence, the screenplay must introduce a superfluous tangent, a relationship between a dancer and one of the Israeli soldiers on the Entebbe raid.

Whatever Padihla was attempting to accomplish, he winds up looking a bit ridiculous when he alternates between a performance of the dance and the movie's climactic end-of-picture rescue.

There’s not much by way of character development among the crew and passengers, aside from a crew member (Denis Menochet) who tries to reason with Bruhl’s character, a publisher of radical books who already has his doubts about the role he’s chosen for himself as a German who may be called upon to kill Jews. The screenplay assigns Bruhl's character a role in saving the lives of the Jewish passengers.

Even Pike’s character, a Baader-Meinhof veteran and the more hardened of the two Germans, eventually admits she might have made a wrong choice.

Padilha knows how to give a realistic pulse to action, and the movie offers an important footnote at the end. Yonatan Netanyahu (Angel Bonanni), the only Israeli soldier to die in the raid, was the brother of Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s current prime minister.

Eventually, the movie tells us that if peace ever is to be achieved, Israel must swallow hard and negotiate. 7 Days in Entebbe does little to make that conclusion feel like more than a faint hope, an afterthought rather than a genuine expression of conviction.

Murder and mystery in Victorian England

There aren't many actors I can say this about, but I'd watch just about any film that features work from Bill Nighy. In The Limehouse Golem, a melodramatic period piece set in Victorian London, Nighy sheds the customary twinkle in his eye (and, yes, it's always a wry twinkle) to play Inspector Kildare, a detective whose colleagues scorn him because of rumors that he might prefer men to women. As played by Nighy, Kildare doesn't seem particularly interested in having sex with anyone; Nighy brings a spirit of existential weariness to his portrayal of a man desperately in need of one last battle to fight. Kildare finds it when he's assigned the unenviable task of solving murders committed by a fiend who refers to himself as The Limehouse Golem. Olivia Cooke portrays Lizzie, a music hall star who becomes the wife of wannabe playwright John Cree (Sam Reid). When Cree, whose career failed to launch, is found dead, Lizzie is accused of having poisoned him. Kildare believes in Lizzie's innocence and thinks that he can exonerate her by solving the Limehouse murders, which are conducted in particularly brutal fashion. Adapted from a novel by Peter Aykroyd, The Lime House Golem includes a string of real-life characters, among them Karl Marx (Henry Goodman), novelist George Gissing (Morgan Watkins) and music hall performer Dan Leno, rendered in a terrific performance by Douglas Booth. Many of the characters become suspects as the movie hops from one red herring to the next before reaching its somewhat strained conclusion. Director Juan Carlos Medina (Insensibles) delivers a richly appointed evocation of 19th Century London in a movie that makes use of twists that are revealed in flashback and speculative scenes about the Golem's true identity. Well acted and richly atmospheric, The Limehouse Golem doesn't quite terrify, even though its talented cast and abundantly colorful artifice sustain interest. Eddie Marsan has an unnervingly creepy turn as Uncle, a music hall master of ceremonies who harbors secret perversities.

A Kaiser in exile and a fraught love story

Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany abdicated his throne in 1918, retreating to the Netherlands, where he lived in exile for another couple of decades. Adapted from the Kaiser's Last Kiss, a novel by Alan Judd, The Exception looks at the Kaiser's life during the heyday of the Third Reich, which the Kaiser evidently hated for its boorishness. A brilliant Christopher Plummer plays the Kaiser as a character reminiscent of a Tolstoy creation, an intelligent but mildly deluded ruler who never has accepted his fall from power. The story kicks off when the Nazis assign a German captain (Jai Courtney) to watch over the Kaiser and keep an eye out for spies. Courtney's Capt. Brandt evidently has been banished himself; he's on a punishment assignment for having gotten crosswise with the SS during a stint in Poland. The Kaiser surrounds himself with a small coterie of loyalists that includes a military aide (Ben Daniels) and the empress, a fine Janet McTeer. The story of a rueful monarch in exile is muddied by Capt. Brandt's infatuation with one of the kaiser's servants (Lily James). Director David Levaux focuses much of the movie on the relationship between the captain and the servant girl, a young woman who happens to be Jewish. Questions about the meaning of loyalty arise for the smitten Capt. Brandt, but the movie's emphasis on romance costs it some hard-edged credibility. Eddie Marsan appears briefly as Heinrich Himmler.

The troubled life of a math whiz

A Brilliant Young Mind tells an affecting story.

The superior intelligence of math prodigy Nathan Elis (Asa Butterfield) separates him from the rest of the society. As a kid who also suffers from a variety of autism, Nathan may be even more isolated than an ordinary genius -- if there is such a thing.

As handled by director Morgan Matthews -- who previously made a documentary about kids such as Nathan -- the fictionalized A Brilliant Young Mind eventually involves Nathan in the International Mathematical Olympiad, a world competition for brainy high school students.

As the story develops, young Nathan travels to Taiwan to train and to determine whether his brilliance at discerning patterns will win him one of six slots on the British team.

Prior to his trip to Taiwan, Nathan is coached by a troubled teacher (Rafe Spall). An epic underachiever and former Olympiad competitor, Spall's Martin Humphreys suffers from multiple sclerosis, a disease that has diminished his hopes for excelling either in professional or personal realms.

Nathan's story hinges on a terrible loss. Early on, his father (Martin McCann) dies in an automobile accident; Nathan's condition worsens, and his relationship with his mother (Sally Hawkins) is made more difficult by the fact that Nathan can't bear to be touched.

Hawkins' Julie appreciates Nathan's gift, but doesn't totally understand him. She encourages Nathan, but his inability to respond to her leaves her as isolated as her son.

Mom's also a bit tyrannized by Nathan's eccentricities. Among other things, Nathan insists that the shrimp balls in a carry-out dinner must add up to a prime number. The stability of his world depends on such things.

While training in Taiwan, Nathan meets a Chinese Olympian (Jo Yang) who takes a liking to him, and coaxes him out of his shell -- at least a little. Unlike Nathan, Jo's character believes there's more to life than numbers.

Butterfield (Hugo and The Boy in the Striped Pajamas) doesn't short change Nathan's difficulties or inwardness, but suggests enough vulnerability to make us fearful that Nathan will be chewed up by a world that has little tolerance for his idiosyncratic compulsions.

Once on the Olympiad track, Nathan finds himself in an intensely competitive environment. The coach of the UK team (Eddie Marsan) demonstrates more interest in winning than in dealing with the personal issues of his charges. Marsan's character is no ogre, but he insists that his young charges be focused.

Flashback scenes between Nathan and his late father have a lovely, playful tenderness; they serve to make scenes between Nathan and his mother even more painful. She lacks the ease and humor with which Nathan's father approached his son.

Sensitive and willing to set formula aside at key moments, A Brilliant Young Mind tells a moving story about a shy genius who knows how smart he is -- and who also senses that his great "gift" may not be enough to make him happy.

A comedy about a wild pub crawl

The World's End scores in unexpected ways.

One shudders to think what The World's End might have been. Had the movie been made by anyone other than Edgar Wright -- the director of a trilogy of movies that began with Shaun of the Dead (2004) and continued with Hot Fuzz (2007) -- it probably would have been a kind of British knock-off of the Hangover movies, a comedy that attempted to max-out on sleaze and grossness.

Consider the plot: Wildly irresponsible Gary King (Simon Pegg) encourages five reluctant buddies to reunite to finish a pub crawl they began when they were young men eager to escape the confines of their hometown of Newton Haven, a northern English town with a generic look and no discernible distinctions.

For a time, it does seem as if Wright and his cohorts (a list that includes Nick Frost, Paddy Considine, Martin Freeman and Eddie Marsan) plan to follow a fairly standard comedy map.

We know, for example, that Frost's Andy, who seems to have buttoned-down his life, will eventually loosen up and abandon his teetotalling ways. But Wright, who wrote the screenplay for The World's End with Pegg, has a stranger, sillier and much more creative movie in mind.

Suffice it to say that the screenplay adds a wild sci-fi twist when the former high-school buddies discover that their hometown has been invaded by aliens who have turned most of the population into robots.

Once this twist has been revealed, the movie becomes increasingly crazier and a lot more inventive, employing some witty and well-executed special effects and adding an appearance by Rosamund Pike, as the sister of one of the men and a love interest for two of them. A game Pierce Brosnan appears in an extended cameo as one of the boys' former teachers.

The World's End, by the way, is the entirely appropriate name of the bar where the pup crawl is supposed to conclude.

As chief instigator, Pegg provides the movie with its centerpiece, sustaining a performance that's at once crazed, gleeful and desperate: The rest of the crew keeps pace.

No point revealing the jokes, but they are plentiful and mostly funny. Wright also manages to infuse the comedy with a sense of abandon without losing control of his movie.

Neat trick: The World's End has just enough trenchancy to keep it from being lost in its own silliness and just enough silliness to keep us from having to take any of it too seriously.